User Accounts Overview

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Before your users can start entering information about their activities, they need Faculty Success user accounts. Without an account, a person cannot access Faculty Success. Nor can you track their activity data, since Faculty Success attaches activities to user accounts. Individuals who may require Faculty Success user accounts include:

  • Current employees
  • Users no longer with the campus but who have activities that must be included in historically accurate reports
  • Staff who do not have tracked activities but who may be entering data on behalf of others
  • Anyone tasked with entering data for another person, such as temporary data entry clerks or students hired for this purpose
  • Anyone serving as an Faculty Success Administrator at any level

Manually entering each user into Faculty Success, one after another, is tedious and error-prone when you need to create accounts for many users at once. Methods that are more efficient involve supplying your users' information in a CSV file or connecting your existing systems to Faculty Success using web services. For more information about creating user accounts in bulk via a Work Request, see Creating and Managing User Accounts in Bulk. For more information about creating user accounts using web services, see Web Services.

All Accounts Must Have an Email Address

Faculty Success requires that all user accounts have an associated email address, regardless of what you have decided to use as usernames.

At times, you may need to create accounts for someone whose email address is unknown. This can be the case for a person who does not have a valid email account at your campus, for whom you do not have a current email address, or for someone no longer associated with the campus whose past activities will be entered by someone else. In these cases, simply enter a unique, fictitious email address for that user.

Usernames

We use usernames for authentication and/or for importing data. Faculty Success uses the first part of users' email addresses for the Faculty Success username unless you specify something else. For example, if an account has an email address of stacyp@yourcampus.edu, Faculty Success will create the account with stacyp as the username.

You may want to assign a different username. For example, if you use LDAP, Portal, or Shibboleth Authentication, the username in Faculty Success must match the campus username.

If you do not want to use the default username, you will need to assign a custom username. Add a USERNAME column to your user creation spreadsheet and fill it with the usernames for the accounts.

The requirements for usernames in Faculty Success are that they:

  • Must be unique
  • Cannot contain the "@" character
  • Cannot be longer than 50 characters
  • May contain any ASCII characters – with the exception of the "@" character, as noted above

Additional Unique User Identifiers - Secondary Identifiers

You may want to associate additional unique identifiers with user accounts to facilitate importing data from other campus systems. You can associate as many unique identifiers with a user account as you would like. We cannot set up unique identifiers to be required. You can only use unique identifiers for importing data, not authentication or Web Service filtering. These identifiers are stored with the user account information within Users and Security.

To create and populate a new unique user identifier as part of creating your first set of user accounts, add a column to your user setup spreadsheet for the new user identifier and fill it with the unique identifiers for the user accounts. The column header should reference the unique identifier the way you would like to refer to it in Faculty Success – for example, EMPLID or UID.

If you have already created your first set of user accounts and now need to add the unique user identifier and populate them for these accounts, use the "Download All User Information" spreadsheet from Users and Security as a starting point. You can simply retrieve a copy of this spreadsheet from Faculty Success, add a column for the new unique user identifier, populate it with the values for each account, and submit the revised spreadsheet through a User Creation work request. Just note that Faculty Success should add the new user identifier in a General work request and we will update the accounts with the values provided.

For more information about the Download All User Information spreadsheet, see Downloading User Account Information.

Bulk Loading User Accounts

Faculty Success has several different functions to enable you to manage several user accounts at once. This will save time if you have to edit more than a few users. You can download a spreadsheet, to which you can add all users' account information, to create multiple users in Faculty Success at one time.

For more information, see Managing Multiple User Accounts.

User Accounts for Faculty and Administrators

Most of the user accounts you will create in Faculty Success will be for faculty who need to track their activities in the system. However, you may have some users who will need access to Faculty Success in order to run administrative reports or assist with managing data. These types of administrative users may not need to track their own activities. If an account for an individual in this category was set up to track activities, any records this user has created for him or herself will appear in reports by default.

To ensure that reports exclude data for individuals meeting these criteria, it is best to remove the ability to track activities – access to the Manage Activities utility – from their accounts. To do this, submit a General work request to Faculty Success with a list of the users for whom the ability to track activities should be removed.

Warning: Removing Manage Activities from an account permanently erases all of the data associated with it, including all activity entries. Do not remove this ability to track activities from a user account unless you are certain you will never need the data in the future.

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